48 leaves

this looks so organized and planned out, but really it is a random double scoopful of leaves from my side yard, cut with a hole punch into circles and laid out in a grid. nature made all of the details, and did all of the color matching for me.

brass section

some woodland virtuoso, please pick up these horns and play.

detritus

a pretty palette of autumn bits that have sifted through the matrix of stems i have laid away for deep winter inspiration. colorful stowaways rescued from the long darkness of a basement corner.

time has become meaningless

we had an early cold snap here. followed by unseasonably warm weather. then several inches of snow. and now almost 50 degrees at the end of november. i used to be able to keep track of the passing of time by the steady and predictable march of our northern seasons. but they are now less easy to read. the leaves on my maple tree this year died on the branch, still green. the forest floor looks different now with all the green leaves among the russets, browns, and yellows. eight months of quarantine have added even more to the current disorientation. days blur into weeks into months. and now even the seasons blur. hurry up 2021. i’m lost.

it’s all in the details

this is one of those images that kills me that i can’t publish in high resolution. the delicate structures of the lichen are foreign and mesmerizing. i tried doing a tight crop on a few of the particularly photogenic blooms, but the full page bleed with hardly any white space (i call it breathing room) just didn’t feel like STILL to me. so i encourage you to zoom in on your screen, and take a walk through this other-worldly landscape at your own pace. maybe i’ll bump into you, i plan to hike over by that ochre bloom in the upper left–the one with the two large overlapping mesas. i think the view from the top could be spectacular.

lichen covered oak limbs